The Wedding - Part III: Chicken Dance? No thanks

Every international wedding must have its interesting and funny parts. In our case, the challenge was how to combine Romanian traditions and a German way of partying.

Romanian weddings mean a lot of traditions, too much food, endless dances and doing all these over one night – regardless how early the party starts.


There are some really funny traditions - for example, the bride and groom each leaving their homes (where they supposedly lived in mom and dad´s house till the marriage) to go to the wedding ceremony. There´s something celebrating and sad in the same time about it, and the Romanians like to mark the moment with music and dance. This old tradition started in villages and it is quite funny now to see it replicated in the large cities – where basically the wedding party starts in front of the block with a circle dance on the street and live music with folk (mostly accordion) musicians. Not everybody does it anymore– and I wouldn´t have had it this way. But I´ve seen some in Bucharest, and my cat Ciquita Bonita was also a big fan of them, always curiously watching from our balcony on the 7th floor.

Well, this is no tradition for Germany. I just can´t imagine well dressed wedding guests dancing and singing on the street – somebody would call the police.

While the bride gets her hair done by the godmother, and the musicians and family sing sad good-bye songs (followed by the street dance in the end), the groom also has his share of ritual departing: he will be shaved by the godfather in the morning. This would have been pretty funny for my own fiancé – he wouldn´t let anybody shave him anyway, especially as he imagined the whole thing being done with an old traditional shaving knife.


Stealing the bride is a must in most Romanian weddings. Some brides are against it, but mostly the deed gets done by a group of loud friends who make the bride disappear around midnight and take her to some disco. This is no longer a surprise for anybody. Usually one of the thieves comes back with one of the bride´s shoes, to prove they´ve got her, and asks for a reward to bring her back. The reward needs to be paid by the godfather or by the groom, depending when exactly the bride was stolen, and consists of funny little arrangements like some bottles of wine or the groom´s singing or declaring something romantic to his bride.


You can guess this bride here did not get stolen, as the German groom declared this would turn the well-established schedule upside down and would bore the guests who would wait for the bride to come back and the wedding to “restart”. So I made it clear to my Romanian guests that stealing the bride is against the law in Germany.


A Romanian wedding tradition that always intrigued me was the Chicken Dance. This is quite an old, meanwhile no longer fashionable tradition, which I remember from earlier weddings. It´s actually the godfather who dances between the tables, holding up in his arms a dead but very cheerfully decorated chicken and collecting small money gifts from the guests. If the godfather was tipsy enough and had entertaining talent, this was a pretty funny moment – although it always left me wondering what would be its deep meaning. Of course, Chicken Dance would be a no-go for our modern and cosmopolitan wedding – not that I would have known how to sell this program piece to my German groom.


There is some meaning in another Romanian tradition, which requires that the bride is redecorated with a traditional scarf placed on her head instead of the bride´s veil. This is a sign that now she´s turning into a serious housewife (and needs to look like one too). The veil is then placed on the bride´s maid head, and this poor young lady should be the next one in line to become a serious housewife. Got my share of that one too. The only thing that I managed to keep consequently away from was catching the bride´s bouquet – but this only to avoid the traditional and cheerful “when-do-you-get-married” interrogations.


Indeed, we did not have many of those traditions at our wedding party. But we did have the Romanian folk dances, which are performed in circle and last up to thirty minutes each (“hora”). First “hora” dances were happily involving the Romanian guests, while our international guests just watched, relieved they don´t have to do it. They did, eventually, as my friend Erika raised everybody from their tables and she would not take no for an answer. The next “hora” saw most non-Romanian guests quickly disappearing God knows where, but we were happy to see some courageous ones still standing and even enjoying them.


The German wedding traditions were nice surprises from our family and friends. We had some funny power point presentations in the style of “1001 nights”, with childhood photos and how we got together. There was a map of Europe where each guest could pin a needle on the place they came from. Polaroid photos were made into a spontaneous guest book. And a bunch of games were prepared, among which bride and groom answering some delicate questions or the bride having to touch a bunch of male guests legs and recognize her groom among them.

I was telling you Romanian weddings have to go on and on till morning the next day. And at the end, you can´t wear your shoes anymore as you probably broke them or lost them during the dance. Well, around two o´clock, when I had the feeling the party is just beginning, our first guests were leaving, to my regret. On the other side, my feet were hurting in a satisfying way, so I guess we did dance enough in the end.

The Wedding - Part II - Preparations and how about an orthodox baptism?

Before we started organizing one ourselves, I always asked myself, why would organizing a wedding take so long and be so complicated? It´s only a bigger party, that´s all.

And still we found ourselves entering the long and laborious circle of preparations – locations / attire / guests / flowers and so on. And moreover, we started all these almost a year before the wedding took place – just like the good old Bridal magazines advice. However we did try to organize most stuff ourselves, and avoid the trap of buying and consuming too much stuff luxuriously offered by the prospering wedding industry.

First, we found a little nice restaurant in Schwarzwald, that we fell in love with – carrying the romantic name of Zuckerbergschloss (the Castle on the Sugar Mountain). What a lovely place to get married into.

Then I had some interesting experience when looking for the perfect wedding dress. I really didn´t fancy looking like a princess, even if the magazines shouted out loud that it´s the only day in one woman´s life when she should look like one, corsage and trail and veil and so on. Also I wanted to spend a very down-to-earth amount of money for the one-night dress – while still looking like a bride.

So I started the quest through the bridal shops. The first shop in a city near by featured a turkish shop-lady who seemed reluctant when she heard my budget, and barely got herself to look for a couple of dresses, actually quite nice. I must have been her charity case of the day. While I was trying them on, she pressured me condescendently that I should buy one right now, otherwise with this cheap price they will be gone very fast. I didn´t want to make her sad or seem ungrateful , but still I went along to other shops. Finally I found a charming one with kind shop ladies who presented the perfect dress to me and declared I looked like a „greek goddess”. Well, I bought it, even though it was above my budget – who wouldn´t like to look like a goddess then?

Planning the wedding ceremony was equally interesting. My fiance and I had long talks about having or not a religious ceremony. I am orthodox, while he was neither baptised, nor a big fan of churches or priests. In my Romanian circle the obvious solution was to get him baptised as orthodox and have a nice traditional orthodox wedding ceremony. The outlook was more than frightening to him, after I explained how a wedding takes place in the orthodox church – although harmless, it can indeed look funny to a non-orthodox. The cherry on the cake was when I told him, half joking, how young people getting baptised will be thrown naked in a big bowl with holly water – with godparents and whole family joyfully assisting. True for small babies, not necessarily for grown ups – but my fiance didn´t want to hear anything about it any more. I guess I would feel the same about some ancient religious ceremony where humans were sacrificed for the gods. So we dropped the idea and I wasn´t sorry for that – somehow I never dreamed about a church wedding myself.

The alternative was Marry Man – a young and nice master of ceremonies, who interviewed us enthusiastically on our meeting and living together and seemed genuinely excited about the whole story – even though he probably hears hundreds of similar stories in his job. Marry Man staged a nice, simple and romantic ceremony, with him telling our story to the guests, our exchanging the rings and some live music in between. All in the open-air pavilion of the restaurant. We loved it.

Another challenge was our guests list. Hey, this was about as strictly done as the Oscars´s guest lists. I was caught up between the Romanian tradition of literaly inviting everybody you know, and our wish to have a small, intimate wedding with only the closest ones. The compromise was a reasonable list where the majority of guests were Romanians, even if our wedding took place in Germany. However names kept on popping up on my side of the list, while my fiance´s face when I was adding dozens of new names on the list was priceless. And for a good reason too: he was the one to do the accomodation arrangements for all our foreign guests.
For all these, he was repaid at the wedding with a bunch of jolly romanian dances – which he had to go through more or less willingly.

- To be continued -

The wedding – Part I – „When are you going to settle down?”

The life of a single girl in Romania, even in the city area, can become complicated once the girl reaches 25 years of age – not to mention 30 or more. You know what I mean: the single obsessing annoying question „when are you going to get married?”. Well, what´s a girl supposed to answer, if she´s not a clear-sighted witch, or if Prince Charming had not yet shown up? And even if he´s there and he had not popped up the question yet?

So looking back, I got this question myself once too many. And the tone, oh my God – from plain curiosity, to condescendence and even to bitter remarks like – you career women, if you wait too long, nobody´s going to want to have you anymore.

Actually, this was only one of the often asked questions that I got during that time. Others revolved around the well-known proprietary needs of my Romanian fellows – when am I going to buy my own flat, or at least a piece of land to build a house? And I was wondering the whole time, what to do with all the inexistent cash in my bank account. Or, why am I not eating any meat? I started thinking that, besides these little details that I needed to fix in my life, I was actually quite ok, if not even perfect.

Finally Prince Charming appeared – a handsome German with blue eyes, who stole my heart at the first sight during a business event in Paris. Then the spirits around my Romanian network quieted down a bit, and version 2.0 of the question started to raise: „when are you going to marry HIM?”.

When the young couple took the decision to move together, before talks of a marriage were done, there must have been some traditionalists which were quite scandalized. My family showed understanding though and they were also happy when they heard about the romantic proposal which was done, some time after, at the beautiful Plitvice Lakes in Croatia where we were on holiday.

I must say I was already very touchy when marriage discussions were approaching – for example I told my mother-in-law that I am patiently waiting for the romantic proposal and will not discuss the topic until then.

Well the good thing is, experience taught me never to ask delicate questions to other people – such as about getting married or having kids or other standard themes on having a traditional life style. So if I ever asked you such a question, cross my heart that it was only fun or slightly ironical and I would never bother you with such stuff.